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There is nothing nice about the Bad Guys,
the heroic antiheroes of Aaron Blabey’s extended series of ridiculous
comic-book-style adventures. No, these guys are bad, even if in a good way. They are also, well, guys, which turns out to be part of the
amusement in the series’ eighth entry, Superbad.
This is emphatically not a
satisfactory entry point for newcomers to Blabey’s sequence, because the book
makes absolutely no sense if you have not read prior ones. It does not make a
whole lot of sense if you have read
the earlier volumes, but let that pass. The previous book was called Do-You-Think-He-Saurus?! It transitioned the series from one about
formerly-bad-but-now-trying-to-be-good characters fighting an evil alien
disguised as the world’s most adorable guinea pig into one about
formerly-bad-but-now-trying-to-be-good characters trying to return from the age
of dinosaurs to the modern world, just in time to encounter an alien invasion
orchestrated by the aforementioned evil alien. Oh, and the equipment that
returns the Bad Guys to modern life endows them with superpowers and brings
along a dinosaur that said equipment transforms into the smartest creature in
the world, or maybe the universe. Nothing complex here at all, right? Well, in Superbad, there is a hilarious opening
sequence in which the Bad Guys use their newfound powers to fight off monstrous
alien war machines – not. Unfortunately, the Bad Guys are completely unable to
control their powers. Mr. Piranha’s super speed does nothing but get him to
zoom head-first into walls and hard objects, very quickly. Mr. Shark’s
transformational ability has him turn into a tremendously threatening….toaster.
Mr. Snake’s ability to levitate objects works fine, but hurling the items in
the right direction, or even putting them down properly, works much less well.
And Mr. Wolf’s super-strength would be useful if it didn’t cause him to burst
out of his clothing and realize that he is naked, causing him to flee in
monumental embarrassment. As for Mr. Tarantula – well, he initiated the
sequence that gave the others superpowers, but that means he did not get any
himself, so he is in a major funk – until Milton, the dinosaur with an IQ of
512, picks Mr. Tarantula to hatch an alien-beating plan. Now, this is not
nearly complicated enough for Blabey’s taste, so all these failures and plans
and arrangements occur at the same time as the introduction of the members of
the International League of Heroes, a group that has been alluded to in prior
volumes but whose only visible member has previously been Agent Fox. In Superbad, readers meet the rest of the
league members: Agent Kitty Kat, Agent Hogwild, Agent Doom, and Agent
Shortfuse. And they are all, well, girls,
which makes for some interesting sidelights on all the mayhem and
ridiculousness. The International League of Heroes manages to more-or-less whip
the Bad Guys into fighting shape by the end of Superbad, and everything seems to be going along as well as things
ever go along in this series – until Rupert Marmalade, the evil alien/adorable
guinea pig, shows up at the end of the book and spoils everything just enough
to set the stage for whatever is going to show up at the beginning, middle and
end of the next book. Whew.

Matters are considerably calmer and animals considerably cuter and
sweeter in the many board books by Sandra Magsamen, who is constantly finding
new ways for parents to say “I love you” to young children and for kids to
interact with all the adorableness. For example, there is a plush basket of
multicolored eggs tightly bound into the cover of Peep, Peep, I
Love You!
This lets kids feel and push on something cute and squishy even before the book
is opened – and they have plenty to do after
it is opened, too. This one is a lift-the-flaps book about farm-animal parents
and babies, all drawn by Magsamen in her usual looking-like-a-sampler style.
First there is a mommy cow munching grass on a left-hand page – and on the
right are three smiling flowers drawn on a flap that opens to the words “Moo,
Moo” and a picture of a baby calf. Then there is a mommy sheep, looking sweetly
woolly, on the left, while rows of vegetables adorn the flap on the right –
which opens to the words “Baa, Baa” and a picture of a little lamb. After
several farm animals are shown, Magsamen concludes the book by putting all of
them, moms and babies alike, on a left-hand page, while the right-hand one
shows an attractive red barn and affirms that even though there are lots of
mommies and babies on the farm, “my favorite baby in the world is – YOU!” This
is Magsamen’s usual message, delivered in her usual method, in a book whose
interactivity is only part of its charm. One thing the book does not have, though, is a goose; but
Magsamen offers that in Mama Loves Her
Silly Goose! This is not an interactive book but is an unusually shaped
one, much taller than it is wide (a bit like a heavy-cardboard pamphlet). The
attraction here is the “goose” part – specifically Mother Goose. What Magsamen
does in the book is to take well-known Mother Goose rhymes and abridge and
twist them just enough to make them enjoyable – and non-scary – for the
littlest children. The white rabbit in “Row, row, row your boat” looks
thoroughly relaxed and happy, as do the little yellow fish jumping about. But
that is a straightforward and pleasant rhyme. What about “Humpty Dumpty”? Well,
he does have the traditional “great fall” in Magsamen’s version of the rhyme –
and shows a big frown when it happens – but instead of the king’s horses and
men unable to reassemble Humpty, Magsamen writes, “Mommy and Daddy knew what to
do: They gave him lots of hugs and kisses, too!” So this turns into an ultimately
happy experience – which is the direction in which Magsamen likes to take
pretty much everything. Jack and Jill, for another example, do fall down the
hill, but the “broke his crown” line about Jack is missing: he is a teddy bear
who twirls around rather happily, upside down, as he heads downhill, and Jill
is also seen twirling down the hill, right side up. By combining well-known
Mother Goose rhymes with her own sense of how to bring comfort and enjoyment to
the youngest children, Magsamen here encourages the same sort of parent-child
bonding that she aims for in her other board books – all of which keep things
short, sweet and enjoyable for parents and kids alike.

There are no geese to be found in
Magsamen’s Our Little Love Bug! But
the basic cute cuddliness of her farm-animal and Mother Goose board books
shines through in this one as well. As the title hints and the smiling,
six-legged, multicolored caterpillar on the front confirms, this is a book inviting
parents to “go buggy” about their little ones. And it encourages young children
to touch and feel the illustrations, each of which has bug parts – feet, legs,
wings – made out of soft felt (the cover calls this a “Heart-Felt Book” – awwww!).
Magsamen creates her own text here, with her usual bright colors enhancing key
words on each page: “Your smile is so sweet, it makes our days,” for example,
has the word “smile” in a larger size than the other words and in multiple
colors – with different designs for the different letters (red stripes on the
white “i,” white polka dots on the orange “e,” and so forth). The book
continues with, “You brighten our world in so many ways” – showing a
black-and-green moth with yellow felt wings – and eventually wends its way to
truly adorable adult and baby purple spiders, the little one’s eight legs all
created in felt for a text that concludes with the book’s title, “you’re our
little love bug!” Parents need not worry about any “ickiness factor” involving
Magsamen’s bugs, which are about as un-icky as it is possible to be. She shows
yet again in this book that characters of all kinds can be used to reach out to
parents and very young children to affirm love, warmth, and all sorts of
adorableness.

What Is Inside THIS Box? A Monkey & Cake Book. By Drew Daywalt.
Illustrated by Olivier Tallec. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $9.99.

Catwad #1: It’s Me. By Jim Benton.
Graphix/Scholastic. $8.99.

Sentient animals and plants are not enough
for some children’s book authors – such as Drew Daywalt, who has created the
exceptionally improbable friendship of a monkey called Monkey and a cake. Yes,
as in birthday cake, angel food cake, devil’s food cake, or, in this particular
case, as in two-layer yellow cake with pink legs, flat pink face and pink
filling between the layers, all topped with a single maraschino cherry. That
visualization comes courtesy of Olivier Tallec, whose whimsy and weirdness are
a fine match for Daywalt’s. And then there is the story told in What Is Inside THIS Box? This is nothing
less than a child-focused rumination on the famous thought experiment of Erwin
Schrödinger, which dealt with the counterintuitive elements of quantum physics
by imagining a way in which a boxed cat could be both alive and dead at the
same time, attaining its definitive state only when observed after the box was
opened. There is nothing so gloomy (or potentially gloomy) here, however – and,
in fact, nothing in the story specifically explaining where it comes from. But
there is a very sly key to the origin on the inside back cover, where Tallec
draws a small, big-eyed black kitten that has the words “Schrödinger’s cat”
next to it. Young children will pass right over this, but adults will enjoy the
book more if they look up the reference. What actually happens in the book is
that Monkey presents a big box to Cake and insists that there is a kitty cat
inside it. Cake becomes so excited that his cherry bounces off the top of his
frosting, and he asks if he can please
see the kitty cat. No, says Monkey, because “it is a magic cat” that
“disappears when I open the box.” Cake cannot figure this out – not even when
Monkey, donning a suitably pseudoscientific lab coat, attempts to draw
illustrations explaining the concept. The two friends argue, with Cake stating,
“I think that there is NO cat in the box when it is open, and when you close
the box, there is still NO cat inside it.” In fact, since there could be anything in the box, or nothing, Cake
declares that there is a dinosaur in the box. Now Monkey is the excited one,
asking to see the dinosaur, and Cake is the one saying “it is a magical
dinosaur” that disappears when you open the box. The friends conclude that “we
will never know” what is in the box, and head away together to get some pie –
leaving the box behind. And when there are no
observers, what do you suppose happens? The box opens, and out comes a dinosaur
with a cat on its back. But no one gets to see them – except, of course,
delighted young readers, and adults who will find this particular version of
“Schrödinger’s dino-cat” to be particularly delightful.

Feline amusements are more straightforward
in the first book of a new Jim Benton series called Catwad. Ever since he created snarky, greeting-card-like cynic and
all-around sarcasm-spewing Happy Bunny, Benton has been casting about for other
animal characters with a similar blend of the outwardly cute and inwardly
devilish. Catwad is not quite in Happy Bunny’s league – Benton has in fact not
come up with any character equally good – but the cover of It’s Me shows a lot of promise, with the title character drawn as a
huge blue blob, with vaguely catlike ears and a mouth curved downward in a
frown so emphatic that it takes up two-thirds of his face. If everything in It’s Me were at this level of
characterization and amusement, the book would be up there in the Happy Bunny
realm – but it turns out to be a (+++) book that is less about Catwad than
about the usual “odd couple” relationship between a grouch and a bright and
upbeat contrasting character. Catwad’s foil and best friend is Blurmp – who, it
turns out in one of the best of the short vignettes that make up this graphic
novel, got that name from his parents because that is the sound he makes when
he passes gas. Yes, that is one of the best
sequences here. Others, however, are duplicates of the sorts of things that
even young readers will have seen elsewhere. There is the one about the
relaxation chair whose remote control Blurmp misuses while Catwad, sitting in
the chair, gets squeezed and pushed and mashed and generally disfigured. There
is the one about the friends staying in a seedy hotel in a room filled with
spiders, which crawl into Blurmp’s mouth – so he swallows them and says he
loves the hotel because he gets breakfast in bed. There is the one in which
Catwad tries to appreciate Blurmp’s love of rainbows – ending up standing
beneath one that collapses on him. None of these is especially creative. On the
other hand, some of the very short Catwad-Blurmp interactions are offbeat and highly amusing. In one,
Blurmp gets a tattoo of his face on his back so Catwad can see Blurmp’s smile
from either side (and that story gets a good deal more elaborate before it
turns out to have been a dream). In another, Blurmp declares himself “a
crime-fighting hero” and changes his appearance while trying on various “origin
stories” before discarding them all – it turns out that his superpower is to
see a criminal getting ready to steal something, so Blurmp swoops in and buys
the item for him to prevent the crime. And there is a bit in which Catwad urges
Blurmp to grow up, at least a little, so Blurmp decides he will “read all of
the MATURE calorie and vitamin information” on foods and “fill out highly
MATURE forms just for the mature fun of it,” and on and on, until even Catwad
admits he prefers the immature
Blurmp. The real issue with Catwad is
that there is not enough Catwad in it: again and again, Blurmp steals the
limelight, which means sweetness and innocence and naïveté win out time after
time. That may be fun for the youngest readers who stumble upon It’s Me. But Blurmp has already worn
thin before this first series entry is over – he is essentially too nice to have much staying power. Catwad
at least has the potential to be the grumpy puss that he seems to be on the
book’s cover. Hopefully he will grow into that potential in future
installments.

Beyond the Call: Three Women on the Front Lines in
Afghanistan.
By Eileen Rivers. Da Capo. $27.

The focus on women in the armed forces
tends, in the United States, to be one of combat readiness: even after the
first female Army Rangers graduated in 2015, questions continued to be raised
about whether standards had been relaxed for them in the name of political
correctness, making the women Rangers less fit than men. Strong denials from
the military to the contrary, this issue continues to reappear from time to
time. Yet women’s roles in combat zones amount to a great deal more than those
on both sides of the female-readiness argument in the U.S. tend to realize.
Just how much more extensive those roles are, and have been, is the topic of Beyond the Call, whose author, Eileen
Rivers, herself served in the armed forces: an Army veteran, she was an Arab linguist
in Kuwait following Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s.

Rivers, now an editor at USA Today, focuses in her book on a
Marine sergeant, an Army major and an intelligence officer, all of whom were
members of FETs in Afghanistan. A FET is a Female Engagement Team with an
unusual and crucial mission: to develop relationships with Muslim women, who
are founts of information on their nations’ customs, needs and difficulties,
but are culturally forbidden to speak to male soldiers. Never mind the facile
notion that they should speak to male
soldiers who are there to protect them: the FETs deal with the reality on the
ground, not the wished-for social equality that is many years, if not
generations, away in a place such as Afghanistan. Rivers’ book follows the
three women – Sgt. Sheena Adams, Maj.
Maria Rodriguez, and Capt. Johanna Smoke – as they go about their duties,
developing relationships with Muslim women in a bid to gather intelligence
vital to U.S. success in the country. Adams, Rodriguez and Smoke are on the
front lines of attempts to engage hearts and minds and thus weaken the hold of
the Taliban on parts of Afghanistan – and they have to fight some
dyed-in-the-wool barriers of their own to do so.

Thus, Beyond the Call is both
a story of the little-known but important role of FETs in Afghanistan and of
the lengths to which military women have gone – have had to go, according to Rivers – to serve in all the ways of which
they are capable. The book actually starts with a short history of women in the
U.S. military before the scene shifts to Afghanistan and the story of a woman
named Jamila Abbas, who became a women’s-rights activist – a role placing her
in great personal danger – after Taliban killers beheaded her husband. The way
Abbas interacts with FET members is an important part of the book, which also
details the personal struggles of the three women profiled within the U.S.
military. Thus, Rivers shows how hard Adams fought her own chain of command to
be assigned to Afghanistan – and what happened when, after she was injured by
an improvised explosive device (IED), her advancement was blocked because she
was not given credit for combat service. Is this a system glitch or systemic
discrimination? Clearly the latter, Rivers suggests, and she says Adams is
scarcely alone in suffering from it.

Rodriguez’ circumstances forced her to fight both the provincial
government in Afghanistan and her own chain of command. She was supposed to
give Afghan policewomen training, but was not allowed, under U.S. military
regulations, to leave base without a male escort. There are arguments
explaining this – having to do with extra risks in a culture such as
Afghanistan’s if women are out and about on their own – but Rivers suggests
that the rules are part of a pervasive anti-female orientation in the U.S.
military that is changing slowly when it changes at all. As for Smoke, Rivers
shows her working with Abbas to register women to vote, contrasting this bid
for female empowerment in a repressive society with the difficulties these FET
members faced in their own military lives.

Beyond the Call is as much an
advocacy book as a military-history-and-analysis one, and, perhaps as a result,
tends to drag: Rivers is not especially skilled at interweaving the two
elements of her narrative, and her writing is matter-of-fact and rather
unstylish. The underlying story of FET members helping the fight for women’s
rights in a country whose entire religious and political system opposes them is
a strong one. But what never quite gels is Rivers’ attempt to relate that level
of systemic oppression to the comparatively small and certainly less dangerous
facing of barriers involved in women’s service in U.S. defense. It is certainly
true that the U.S. military has not been an equal-opportunity organization
where men and women are concerned, and that the country as a whole continues to
face many issues of inequality involving a wide variety of under-appreciated
groups. But comparing the structural inefficiencies and slow-to-change policies
of the United States with the vicious, violent, religiously based systemic
oppression of the patriarchal system in Afghanistan really makes no sense.
Adams, Rodriguez and Smoke certainly had to overcome barriers to be able to do the
work that, by Rivers’ account, they all did well and with pride. But their
difficulties are on an entirely different level from those of Abbas and the
other women trapped in a system that, by the standards of the generally open
and designedly secular one in the United States, is backward and borderline
evil – just the sort of fertile ground in which cancerous growths such as the
Taliban flourish and become extremely difficult to root out.

As showcases for instruments that are not
usually thought of as “showcase instruments” – that is, ones heard far less
often in a front-and-center role than violin or piano – these two MSR Classics
CDs give performers plenty of chances to show the breadth and depth of their
instruments and the types of pieces designed to highlight their technique. Not
all the works are filled with virtuosity, but some certainly are. The first
piece on Johanna Lundy’s CD, Interstellar Call (from Des canyons aux étoiles…)
by Messiaen, is intended to reflect some of the natural majesty of the United
States but is notable mostly for the extreme demands it places on the
performer, from glissandos to passages where the keys must be kept half-closed.
Lundy’s ability to surmount the technical issues and make the music sound
communicative is quite an accomplishment, even if what the piece communicates is not particularly notable. Next on
the disc is Fantasy Pieces by Jay
Vosk (born 1948), one of three world première
recordings here. In this work, the horn’s sound is considerably more
traditional, although Vosk, like Messiaen, tries to use it to express feelings
about American natural beauty. Concert Étude by
Finnish conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen (born 1958) has some
attractively playful melodies and rhythms: it sounds less serious than the
Messiaen and Vosk works, although it is scarcely frivolous. Next comes the
longest and most interesting work on the disc, as well as the oldest: Bach’s Partita in A minor, BWV 1013, in Lundy’s
adaptation of an arrangement by Michel Rondeau. This work was originally designed to display the
virtuosity of the transverse flute, and thus might be expected to sit rather
uneasily on the horn – certainly the natural horn of Bach’s time could not have
managed it. But Lundy handles the piece with sensitivity and skill, and with considerable
emotion in the Sarabande – not,
perhaps, a particularly historically informed performance, but one that
connects emotionally in a way that the horn is particularly capable of doing. Any
work following this one would be a bit of a letdown, which is the fate of Night Storm by Dan Coleman (born 1972),
another world première recording. Inspired by Walt Whitman’s “Proud Music of
the Storm,” the piece moves in strong bursts alternating with sustained
passages, and while the sound and fury are there, what it all signifies is rather
modest – although the conclusion, in the horn’s very lowest register, is
impressive both in sound and in Lundy’s playing. The Bach might better have
been followed by the next work on the CD, Laudatio
by Bernhard Kroll (1920-2013), which was inspired by the hymn Te Deum Laudamus and effectively
presents a series of emotional touchstones. Kroll’s piece is followed by Sea Eagle by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies
(1944-2016), a tone painting celebrating a bird that was reintroduced to an
island off Scotland. The work has a thrilling and exceptionally difficult
concluding Molto presto that Lundy
takes in a single breath – a genuinely breathtaking achievement. This would
have been a wonderful ending for the disc, but there is one more piece, the
final world première recording. It is Canyon
Songs for horn and strings, by Pamela Decker (born 1955). It is actually
this particular arrangement, which dates to 2017, that has not been recorded
before; and it is nicely done, with an overall feeling of meditative peace that
contrasts in pretty much every way with the conclusion of Davies’ work. In this
context, though, it seems rather pale and wan, yet another celebration of natural
beauty whose intended expressions about the wonder of creation are
comparatively straightforward – although, as with everything here, played with
sensitivity and tremendous skill.

All seven bassoon-and-piano works
performed by Christin Schillinger and Jed Moss are world premières, and the
intent of this CD is as much to put the composers in the limelight as to focus
on the bassoon’s capabilities in contemporary music. This is not an entirely
happy approach, because the works, while pleasant and well-made enough, are by
and large not especially distinguished, while Schillinger’s performance
abilities are sufficiently impressive to entice listeners into wanting to hear
her cut loose in some music that is less self-consciously modern than are many of
these pieces. The disc opens with Three
Miniatures for Bassoon and Piano by Michael Van Bebber (born 1976): works
of about a minute each that are unsurprising harmonically and rhythmically.
Next is Double Helix by Jenni Brandon
(born 1977), which blends and contrasts bassoon and piano more effectively and
to better effect, but has less to say than its five-movement structure would
seem to indicate. Diaphonic by Kyle
Hovatter (born 1986) is for bassoon and tape and is just one of innumerable
pieces in which composers merge acoustic and electronic sounds without really
enhancing either. Swing Shift by
Adrienne Albert (born 1941) is considerably more interesting, including
percussion as well as bassoon and piano and proceeding through a pleasantly
jazzy sonic landscape. Three Night Pieces
by Damian Montano (born 1976) is the longest work here – its three sections run
17 minutes – and has some moments of effective tone-painting, notably in the
second movement (“Mysterious Elixir”). But it overstays its welcome, especially
in the outer movements, which initially make their points effectively but
insist on returning to them again and again. Victoria Rooms by Geoffrey Burch (born 1979) is designated as being
“for improvised bassoon and tape,” and this presumably gives it an extra dose
of contemporary flair, but it just sounds overdone and rather silly in a kind
of Grade B horror-movie way. The disc ends with Goodbye, Old Paint by John Steinmetz (born 1951), which draws on a
cowboy song of the American West and has a suitably folksy and rather
old-fashioned feeling about it. Schillinger’s talent is substantial, as is her
artistry; and she apparently feels drawn to the works here out of a commitment
to bring contemporary composers and their music to a wider audience. That is
all well and good, when the music is sufficiently worthy – but by and large,
the pieces here are not special enough in sound or structure to tempt listeners
to seek out more works by the same people. The audience will, however, likely
be interested in hearing more performances by Schillinger, hopefully in repertoire
that allows her to display her prowess while it better engages listeners’ interest.

The situation involving a new CD featuring
performances by clarinetist Jean-François Charles is somewhat analogous, except
that in this case, Charles is both composer and performer. The reaction of
listeners who are not already deeply committed to the form and sound of the
music here, however, is likely to be similar to that of listeners who hear
Schillinger’s excellent playing: it would be good to hear Charles in
somewhatmore-forgiving and
more-engaging repertoire. It is possible to understand the motivation for music
composed as Charles has composed the works on this disc, and even to admire the
skill with which the material has been created and put together, without
necessarily liking the end product very much. The issue of the genuinely
unpleasant sound of some of these works is especially acute because the
inherent sound of the clarinet is so beautiful. Charles mixes live electronics
with his clarinets in such a way as to give the overall impression – to modify
a comment made by Hans von Bülow about Brahms’ Violin Concerto – that Charles
is composing not for the clarinet but
against it. The first Electroclarinet is for B-flat clarinet,
the second for contrabass clarinet, the third for basset horn, the fourth for
E-flat clarinet, the fifth for clarinet in A, the sixth for bass clarinet, and Lina is for contrabass clarinet (and is
the only piece on the CD that does not include live electronics). As in the
works of John Cage, these pieces by Charles seem designed to extend the
definition of music to include pretty much everything that a listener may hear
while attending and ostensibly paying attention to a concert or recital. The
physical sound of the clarinets’ keys, the breaths taken by Charles during
performances, and of course the multiplicity of the usual electronic yawps and
screeches and outbursts – all these are part of the “musical experience” here.
So are the quite obvious attempts to push the instruments beyond what could be
described as their (not just the audience’s) comfort zone: for example, near
the end of Lina, it actually sounds
as if the instrument is being strangled by a rather inept executioner (it is
interesting to compare the sound here with that at the end of the “March to the
Scaffold” in Berlioz’ Symphonie
fantastique). Charles describes several of the Electroclarinet pieces as homages – to Debussy, Weber, Messiaen,
and Stravinsky – but whether the audience (as opposed to Charles himself) will
pick up any sense of tribute is doubtful. A great deal of focus in contemporary
music is to bring listeners sounds that they have not heard before, using
nontraditional methods (especially computers and other forms of electronics) to
accomplish what Charles Ives said more than a century ago, to create music that
should “stretch the ears.” But there is a certain point at which what is being
heard is no longer music but a concatenation of sounds. Indeed, some of Ives’
own music was accused of being just that – but Ives was never trying to force an audience to
reconsider what “music” is, any more than, say, Edgard Varèse was. It was Cage
who insisted on that reconsideration, and composers such as Charles have continued
to insist on it. Some audiences will surely thrive on aural experiences along
the lines of the one offered on Charles’ disc, but others can surely be
forgiven for wishing they could hear Charles’ obviously very considerable
performance skill employed in the service of pieces that work with the
clarinet’s inherent warmth and melodiousness rather than so very determinedly
against them.

December 06, 2018

Some authors hit their stride and never leave it – or need to leave it.
They find something they do well and, by virtue of doing it slightly
differently time and time again, create an ongoing (and sometimes nearly
unending) series of books that can capture readers at any point and keep them
interested and entertained. Vivian Vande Velde manages to do this without
actually producing “sequence” books. She simply returns, time and again, to
fairy-tale tropes, twisting them just enough to keep them amusing and
interesting for young readers while retaining enough of their original structure
to imply (rather than state) that the background of all her books is
essentially the same. This is all formulaic in a sense, but it does not feel formulaic, because Vande Velde
rings just enough changes on the modified-fairy-tale formula each time to keep
things both light and interesting. Vande Velde’s latest version of this
approach, The Prince Problem, is
frothy and fun and silly and overdone and thoroughly enjoyable, which is a
pretty good set of adjectives to describe her work in general. The title is
very slightly misleading, since there are actually two “prince problems” here, although if read as “the problem
involving the ‘prince’ issue in general,” the title makes perfect sense. The
primary prince here is named Telmund and is the typical youngest-son-with-great-potential
– or wishes he could be. Unfortunately, he is merely the fourth of fifth
children of the local king and queen, who inconveniently had a fifth child
seven years after Telmund’s birth – leaving Telmund, at age 13, as little more
than a glorified babysitter, unceasingly reading fairy tales in the hope of
someday finding a way to be heroic. The princess here – of course there is one in
a nearby kingdom – is intelligent, studious, determined Amelia, whose naïve
fairy-tale-like parents very much want her to select a prince, any prince, to whom she can be
betrothed, to protect their kingdom from being allied against their will with
the odious Prince Sheridan, who covets their land because every Vande Velde
story needs a dyed-in-the-wool bad guy. So Sheridan is one “prince problem” and
Telmund, it turns out, is another, because while babysitting youngest brother
Wilmar, who is making a major mess of the peasants’ and tradespeople’s goods at
an open-air market, Telmund attracts the unwanted attention of a nearby witch. She
thinks he is bullying Wilmar and decides to teach him a lesson. Knowing how
such things go and unable to dissuade her, Telmund begs not to become a frog,
so the witch gets clever (that is, Vande Velde gets clever) and Telmund is
bespelled to become a different animal every other time he falls asleep. Thus,
he sleeps and becomes a rat; sleeps and becomes himself; sleeps and becomes a
rabbit; and so on. This is the sort of clever twist on fairy tales that makes
Vande Velde’s books fun despite their underlying familiarity of plot. Will
Amelia escape the depredations of Prince Sheridan? Will Telmund find a way to
be the hero he wants to be, or at least a hero of some sort, and eventually
throw off the transformation spell? Of course, the answer to both questions is
“yes,” but the way Vande Velde merges the characters’ stories is what makes for
the enjoyment here, along with wondering what sort of animal Telmund will
change into next time. The humor can even be sly, as when Telmund awakens with
feathers and thinks things are not so bad, since he can fly and explore things
and help Amelia, who by this point he has decided to rescue after Prince
Sheridan has her kidnapped – only to discover that he is a mere rooster and can
barely get off the ground. The inevitable happy ending and friendship of
Telmund and Amelia – which may grow
into something more, even though she is two years older than he – detracts not
a whit from the pleasure of watching that friendship develop despite numerous
stumbles and pitfalls.

James Burks takes a more-standard approach to creating variations on a
theme in his Bird & Squirrel
graphic novels: the books form an actual sequence rather than standing on their
own. Of course, it is quite possible to read them independently, but anyone who
does will miss out on some of the back story that is taken for granted in each
new volume. The fifth of the books, Bird
& Squirrel All Tangled Up, makes the characters’ personalities clear at
the start, with happy-go-lucky Bird flying in loops while cautious and nervous
Squirrel is having nightmares about protecting his daughter, Birdie (whose mom,
Red, has gone off to help Grandmole; how Squirrel and Red got together is part
of the back story that readers can only get if they read the previous book, On Fire). Squirrel is such a
stick-in-the-mud that Birdie pleads to go with Red instead of staying home and
being bored. But of course when Bird comes to visit, things get more
interesting: Bird says it is a good day to go hunting Bigfeet (not “Bigfoot,”
because “they have two feet, not one,” as Bird explains). Squirrel points out
that Bigfeet do not exist, but is eventually roped into going along on the
outing that Bird and Birdie want so much. The adventures here are generally
quite mild – this is a graphic novel for readers just old enough to be
interested in graphic novels – as Squirrel gradually loosens up and starts to
enjoy things. Then, of course, something goes wrong, through an encounter with
a gigantic spider – and it is Squirrel, with Birdie’s help, who saves the day
after Bird’s adventurous nature leads to more problems than solutions. Birdie,
after at one point saying she would rather have Bird as a dad than Squirrel,
comes around to realizing that Squirrel is a better father. “I’m much better at
being the fun uncle,” Bird says, accurately. And Squirrel tells Birdie, “I
wasn’t doing you any favors by trying to protect you from everything.” Lessons
learned and fun experienced, the three characters head back to Squirrel’s home
for the return of Red and a cameo appearance by, yes, Bigfeet (or Bigfoot). The
family-focused themes and the importance of balancing caution and adventure appear
in all the Bird & Squirrel books,
with Burks varying them enough to keep things interesting even while building
each of the graphic novels on the same foundation of personality contrast
between Bird and Squirrel. It is a formula, yes, but a winning one, with just
enough variety to keep all the books enjoyable.

A New Theory of Teenagers: Seven Transformational
Strategies to Empower You and Your Teen. By Christa M. Santangelo, Ph.D. Seal Press.
$14.99.

Teenagers are essentially two-year-olds a
decade or so later, requiring parents to allow them the same sort of
exploration they were allowed around age two while the parents practice
meditation to calm themselves, keeping a small part of their brain in “aware”
mode to be sure teens’ wide-ranging search does not result in significant harm.
That is essentially the “new theory” of California clinical psychologist
Christa M. Santangelo, which is not really a very new theory at all. Santangelo
herself knows this: A New Theory of
Teenagers has more footnotes than typical books for general readership, as
Santangelo is at pains to show how her ideas incorporate and build upon those
of many others.

Parents, understandably, will be most
interested in what those ideas are and how exactly they work in practice. The
“what” element is handled by Santangelo by dividing the book into seven
“transformative strategy” chapters whose New Age-y titles are not,
unfortunately, particularly helpful: “Endure Emotions,” “Enlarge the Lens,”
“Don’t Grasp—Let Go,” Discover Profound Purpose,” “Contemplate Infinite
Possibility,” “Heal Thyself,” and “Go Within.” Santangelo’s emphasis is on
seeing conflict as a growth opportunity: the unending difficulties that are
common between parents and teens, she argues, are the method by which teenagers
form themselves into adults, and the job of parents is to accept the
inevitability of those conflicts while being available when necessary to
prevent or mitigate actual harm.

This sounds good, but as in so many
prescriptions and proscriptions, the devil is in the details. Santangelo has
what is essentially a one-size-fits-all approach to the frustration, anger,
unhappiness and trauma that parents sooften feel from teens’ words and actions:
meditate. A very Californian approach to difficulty, meditation is scarcely the
panacea that Santangelo thinks it is, but her emphasis on it is quite strong.
Again and again, A New Theory of
Teenagers comes back to it: “Even if you don’t believe in a higher power, I
urge you to give this exercise a chance. …This is the home of your soul. There
is no fear here – only peace. I want you to imagine that a Spirit is now in
your midst. You feel the profound love of this Spirit. …Let the love of this
Spirit touch you. It reaches your fear, your sadness, your sense of separation.”

Those who find this guided approach and
this style of writing congenial are the natural audience for Santangelo’s book.
Others will find it superficial at best – doubly so because Santangelo is
remiss in not showing exactly how her recommendations have actually worked in
her clinical practice or could be expected to work in readers’ everyday,
real-world life. For example, one of her many stories is about a woman she
calls Lisa, who “drew the line at tattoos” because she was “the daughter of Holocaust
survivors who were tattooed as part of the extermination process.” Lisa’s
17-year-old son “got a large image of his dog, face in a menacing growl, across
his shoulder.” Santangelo says the tattoo “stood for his deep bond with his
dog” and that “Lisa’s relationship to her family’s past was keeping her from
being able to step back and let go appropriately.” Really? Santangelo
apparently believes that one of the most horrific occurrences of modern times,
which directly affected this family, should be downplayed for the sake of a
teen’s “deep bond with his dog.” Or does
she believe this? She states directly, “To be clear, I was not counseling Lisa
to ‘accept the tattoo.’ Parents set the moral and behavioral directives.” But
Santangelo never says what she did
counsel Lisa to do, how she did
recommend moral and behavioral directives be set, how she did help Lisa and her son reach across the abyss of the son’s
tattoo. Again and again, Santangelo’s book frustrates in this manner: it lapses
into generalities and platitudes when parents who pick it up are quite likely
and quite rightly going to want specifics of what works, and what has worked in
Santangelo’s experience. Saying that parents “need to allow your teen the space
to become themselves [sic]” is simply
not enough.

What is irritating in A New Theory of Teenagers is this repeated contrast between
statements that are well-considered and practical applications that are
missing. “I have found that the first step toward learning how to let go while
also guiding and staying connected to your teen is to know your fears.” That
makes sense, as does the partial list of typical parental fears that Santangelo
supplies. But it fits poorly with a statement such as, “Teens use minor, not
harmful, moments of deception to create distance and their own space as a
developmentally appropriate movement away from parents.” But a great many
deceptions are far from “minor” and “not harmful,” and they are the ones with
which parents need more help than to be told, “When you learn to accept and
embrace painful feelings, then true transformation can occur.”

The sixth of Santangelo’s chapters, “Heal
Thyself,” is in many ways the core of this book. Here she urges “inviting the
inner child to take form and speak” as “a handy tool to go back in time and
talk about this place that often doesn’t get articulated but rather is
repressed, denied, or acted out – often with your teen.” This is a valid
psychoanalytic approach, but one that is virtually impossible to do without
considerable therapeutic guidance. A glib statement that “this isn’t easy work”
and another, a couple of pages later, saying that this “is slow, painstaking,
yet ultimately deeply rewarding work” are ultimately valueless to readers of
the book except insofar as they suggest that parents of teens – perhaps all parents of teens – need psychological
therapy in order to help themselves and their children through the teenage
years. Santangelo never says that outright, but that would indeed be a new
theory, one going well beyond the facile notion of self-analysis mixed with
meditation that is supposed to help parents cope with the extreme (scarcely
minor) behaviors and activities of their teenaged children.

As Rachel Dunne’s dour, dismal Bound Gods fantasy trilogy moves to its
conclusion and Ian Douglas’ SF trilogy-of-trilogies moves to its penultimate
adventure, both authors stay true to the worlds and universes they have created
and the characters and motivations that have moved the plots of these sequences
– for better or worse. Dunne’s action-packed, often gruesome 500-page The Shattered Sun features the same
unpleasant characters as In the Shadow of the Gods and The Bones
of the Earth, the two prior novels, and forces readers to accept the notion
that the less-awful characters are on the better of the two bad sides. Dunne’s
interpretation of dark fantasy is very dark indeed, making it unusually
suitable that the plot of The Shattered
Sun involves the “Long Night,” a time of unending darkness ushered in by
the evil Twins, long-imprisoned gods who – at the end of the previous book –
returned to a measure of power by taking over the bodies of human twins.
Twinning is crucial to the entire Bound
Gods trilogy, explaining why infant twins have long been slaughtered
without mercy (because they might eventually become vessels for the evil gods)
and why two of the less-bad characters have long been in hiding under a cloud
of desperation (because they are twins who have managed to grow up). The first
two books of the trilogy involved attempts to revive – or prevent the revival
of – the fallen gods Fratarro (obviously and rather strangely named from Latin frater, brother) and Sororra (soror, sister, with one twin god’s name
having an “o” ending and one having an “a” for gender differentiation: the use
of vaguely Latin names in a world that is supposed to be utterly unlike ours is
a peculiarity of this trilogy). With the Twins’ re-emergence into what appears
to be full power at the end of the second book, the third must involve a grand
battle to defeat them, lest the world be plunged into the never-ending darkness
that is the Twins’ preferred form of existence. Why? Well, Dunne never really
says: the Twins’ sole motivation is to get back at their unseen “parent” gods,
“father” Patharro and “mother” Metherra (again from Latin: pater and mater plus the
respective “o” and “a” endings). Dunne distracts from the frivolity of the
underlying motivation by focusing again and again on the depredations of the
Twins and their followers on many characters, themselves included (some
especially powerful Twins backers pierce their own eyes so they can share the
darkness for which the Twins stand). The problem with The Shattered Sun and the whole Bound
Gods trilogy is that the Twins’ opponents are just as brain-damaged and
body-ruined as are their supporters. The antiheroic leader of the opposition, a
former priest of the Twins named Joros, is a really nasty, vicious and
duplicitous piece of work, and the people who follow him – all more or less
unwillingly – are not much better, being deeply damaged in brain, body or both.
The drug-addicted, mind-addled sorcerer Anddyr is one of the more-coherent and
more-sympathetic characters, in contrast to now-grown sewer rat Rora, a
supposedly first-rate fighter who, earlier in the trilogy, returns to her
former haunts – where her “family” members mutilate her and nearly beat her to
death in a very explicit way, resulting in her decision in The Shattered Sun to return to the same people again and yet again
be nearly beaten to death in a very explicit way that also results in several
of her companions being imprisoned and tortured. Add Scal, a mass murderer who
silently stalks and kills pretty much anyone at pretty much any time, at the
command of a deeply scarred and even more deeply vicious woman named Vatri, who
is the self-proclaimed seer of the “parent” gods, and you have a pretty
accurate picture of the “good” characters here. Eventually, since it is better
for the sun to exist than to have the world plunged forever into night, the
more-or-less-good guys win out over the less-or-more-bad ones, and Dunne
produces a very slightly positive conclusion after suitably grand and gory
battles, betrayals and general mayhem. Dunne actually writes well, but the Bound Gods trilogy is so downbeat and
depressing that readers who have ground their way through it and who prefer
anything other than the very darkest of dark fantasy will likely feel mostly
relief when the whole thing lurches to its essentially foregone conclusion.

There is also a certain amount of lurching going on in the Star Carrier thrice-trilogy as the
eighth of the nine books arrives. Ian Douglas (one of the pen names of William
H. Keith, Jr.) has been stringing plots and readers along for many, many pages
with this
interstellar/military/consciousness/religion/multiple-alien-encounters tale, in
which humanity triumphs again and again when confronted with a growing series
of supposedly superior races and technologies (the latter including its own AI
and super-AI creations). Underlying the particular form of humanity that
Douglas creates here is a series of religious wars that led to a decree called
the White Covenant, under which public displays of religion were banned, as was
proselytizing. Religious or pseudo-religious elements continue to peek and poke
their way into Star Carrier, though,
being intertwined with the whole notion of a higher consciousness, evolution,
species that have developed along lines entirely different from that of
humanity, and other typical (and typically overdone) SF tropes. At the center
of the multiple plot lines is Trevor “Sandy” Gray, a longtime military leader
and apparently a closet Christian (in the seventh book, Dark Mind, he mentally objects, at some length, to the celebration
of the winter solstice rather than Christmas). Gray both depends on machine
intelligence (as do pretty much all the characters here) and is skeptical of it
and worried that it could endanger humanity; this is nothing unusual in SF or,
for that matter, in real-world news stories. In Dark Mind, Gray took on a mission from a super-AI called Konstantin
to investigate a star system that might have a super-advanced alien race that
might help humanity fight a race of sentient bacteria that controls a wide
variety of alien species. To investigate this system, Gray had to disobey
orders from his superiors, a major no-no in military circles, but Gray did so
because he is heroic and upstanding and an all-around good guy. The result was
that Gray’s command of his starship – the America,
no less – was taken away, and he has been left without the organizational,
hierarchical moorings of his longtime military service. This, it turns out, is
exactly what Konstantin (at least the Konstantin clone aboard the America) wanted, because without a
starship to command, Gray can be sent in Bright
Light on a mission to the remote star Deneb, where Konstantin will arrange
for him to encounter yet another mysterious and immensely powerful alien
civilization that may be able to prevent humanity from being wiped out again.
Umm, no, that may again prevent humanity from being wiped out. Something like
that. Anyway, the title Bright Light
refers to an all-new artificial intelligence, although how far superior it can
be to the virtually all-knowing (or at least all-manipulating) Konstantin is
hard to determine. It is scarcely surprising that a series as extended as this
one is packed with characters and plot lines, but Star Carrier at this point seems overextended and a trifle tired.
Planet-sized brains not enough of an enemy for humans? How about minuscule
bacteria? That sort of thing: Douglas seems to be reaching for greater and
greater complexity and complication at the service of what is, foundationally,
a rather simple premise under which superior alien races nearly destroy
humanity repeatedly but are beaten back because humans, gosh darn it, just have
so much pluck and such willingness to risk everything by doing stuff they don’t
fully understand but that, by golly, actually works. It is a kind of
country-bumpkin view of humanity, and it leaves Gray and the other Star Carrier characters seeming
something less than vibrant, never mind intelligent. Still, readers who have
stuck with the series so far will find Bright
Light a solid advancement of the whole Star
Carrier sequence and will surely be looking ahead to the coming final book.
For that matter, readers who dipped into the series early – its first few books
were its best – will also look forward to the coming last entry, if only
because Douglas, who is nothing if not an adept writer, is likely to use it to
provide a suitably uplifting finale.

The idea of re-scoring Mahler for chamber
forces is neither new nor entirely out of character for the composer’s music.
In the 1920s, Mahler’s works were among those performed under the auspices of
Arnold Schoenberg and other members of the Second Viennese School at their
Society for Private Musical Performances, whose concept was to present
large-scale modern works by both well-known and little-known composers, played
by first-rate musicians – but only 12 to 20 of them, using arrangements made by
Schoenberg himself or by members of his circle. The reason this works rather
surprisingly well for Mahler is that, for all his demands for gigantic
orchestral forces, Mahler very often used the instruments in chamber-music
fashion: he needed a great number of them to allow the production of a wide
variety of sonic combinations, not (or at least not always) to produce a sheer
mass of weighty sound. Thus, the Foghorn Classicsrelease of string-quartet arrangements of
three Mahler song cycles by Zakarias Grafilo, first violinist of the Alexander
String Quartet, deserves to be seen (and heard) as a way to elucidate some of
the music’s emotional and structural impact – employing forces different from
those Mahler chose and therefore able to communicate in their own distinct way.
There are, however, some pitfalls in arranging these particular cycles for
string quartet, because of Mahler’s acknowledged brilliance in orchestration.
In particular, one of the five Rückert-Lieder
is scored by Mahler for no strings at all: Um
Mitternacht calls only for woodwinds, brass, timpani, harp and piano. So
transforming it into a work that is only
for strings is, at the very least, a bold undertaking. Furthermore, one of the Kindertotenlieder – the midpoint of the
five-song cycle, Wenn dein Mütterlein
– uses no violins, making half of a string quartet potentially intrusive into
the mood. This song too emphasizes woodwinds, although it does include some
string parts. Grafilo’s sensitivity to Mahler actually comes through
particularly well in this very piece, where he gives the extended English-horn
solo to the viola, whose tone fits the material to fine effect. The reality is
that all these quartet adaptations can and perhaps should be regarded as
experiments in sonority and emotional communication, and if they are not
entirely Mahlerian in the former of those ways, they are highly effective in
the latter. Much credit for their expressive impact goes to mezzo-soprano
Kindra Scharich, who is equally adept with the lilt of parts of Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (usually
sung by a male voice, in accordance with the texts, but aptly fitting a
middle-range female voice); the quiet anguish of most of Kindertotenlieder; and the explosive beginning and middle of the
latter cycle’s final song, In diesem
Wetter. Scharich feels as well as sings the music, and varies her delivery
of the texts to mostly excellent effect.Only the Rückert-Lieder fall a
bit short: Blicke mir nicht in die
Lieder! and Ich bin der Welt abhanden
gekommen are both rather too matter-of-fact – particularly surprisingly in
the case of the latter song, given Scharich’s sensitivity to that song’s
emotions as expressed elsewhere. Most of the singing and emotion here, though,
are first-rate, and the Alexander String Quartet is excellent throughout,
supporting Scharich when called for, interacting with her when the music so
requires, and providing contrast to her vocalizing when that is appropriate.
Grafilo’s arrangements almost always lie well on the instruments (no small
feat), and while listeners familiar with these song cycles will surely miss
some of the many elegant and piquant touches that Mahler brought to them,
anyone who loves and appreciates the music should easily hear the respect
reflected both in the instrumentation here and in the singing. Certainly this
is not the version of these song
cycles to own, but certainly it is a
version that is very much worth having.

The violin-and-piano arrangements of
Brahms’ Hungarian Dances have a much
earlier provenance than Grafilo’s quartet arrangement of Mahler songs: the
Brahms works were arranged during Brahms’ own lifetime, and very much with his
approval, by violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim – in 1871 and 1880. Joachim was the
great violinistic influence on Brahms, responsible for inspiring both Brahms’
Violin Concerto and his Double Concerto, and Joachim’s handling of the Hungarian Dances is a particularly happy
melding of form with virtuosic function. This version of the 21 dances is very
much a violinist’s dream (and, to some technical extent, nightmare): the piano
is relegated to an almost wholly subsidiary role by Joachim (something Brahms,
himself a fine pianist, would not likely have done). Yet without the piano
providing the harmonic and rhythmic foundation of the dances, the violin would
be unable to soar to the heights that Joachim wants – and what heights they
are! Listening to Sabrina-Vivian Höpcker’s performance on a new Delos CD is a
tremendously involving and exhilarating experience, likely to make anyone
familiar with this music wonder why Joachim’s transcription is not heard more
often. Part of the reason surely involves the diminution of the piano part –
although Fabio Bidini scarcely seems to see himself in a lesser role, throwing
himself into the music in full-partnership mode. It may be that this version of
the Hungarian Dances simply requires
so much abandonment, such intensity of expression in old-fashioned Romany
(Gypsy) mode, that only a violinist capable of merging over-the-top musical
emoting with impeccable technique can bring the work off with genuine élan.
Höpcker is an ideal exponent of the material: she is never dismissive of its
folk-music and popular elements (most of the dances were probably Brahms’
arrangements of tunes he had heard rather than ones he himself composed), but
neither does she try to make the dances overly serious or, heaven forfend,
somber. The Hungarian Dances are
almost, in their way, proto-film music, overdone both in their emotional
evocation (which is melodramatic rather than dramatic) and in their celebratory
vivacity. The best-known dances, such as Nos. 1 and 5, sound fresh and new in
the hands of Höpcker and Bidini, while the less-known ones come into their own
both as individual pieces and in the overall context of the set of 21. Surely
every classical-music lover needs to have these dances in both their orchestral
and piano-four-hands versions, and surely they are already a staple of many
people’s collections. But this wonderful recording of a version that is just as
valid as Brahms’ own comes close to being a must-have for anyone who loves this
music: relatively few people will have heard the Hungarian Dances this way before, which means few will realize just
how much they have been missing by not knowing what Joachim put into the
material and what Höpcker has now extracted from it.

November 29, 2018

Cubicles That Make You Envy the Dead: A “Dilbert”
Book. By
Scott Adams. Andrews McMeel. $14.99.

What exactly keeps the newspaper business
going these days can be rather hard to fathom, but part of the answer must be,
“the comics pages.” These collections of daily bits of amusement and/or visual
commentary and/or drama help balance the generalized awfulness found pretty
much everywhere else in the traditional newspaper. And although it is certainly
possible to read most newspaper comics online – and to read some comics that
are actually created online, for Internet-only dissemination – the comic-strip
medium originated in print and still seems to fit most comfortably there. To be
sure, the reduction in comics’ printed size in recent years has made life
extremely difficult for artists whose work shows painstaking detail, and the
long tradition of four-panel daily strips has given way in many cases to
three-panel ones to allow a smidgen of additional space per panel. Yet some
strips have emerged that thrive under these far-less-than-ideal circumstances,
and Scott Adams’ Dilbert, which
appears in a remarkable 2,000 newspapers worldwide as well as online, is a kind
of poster child for modern-strip success.

Adams has drawn Dilbert for almost 30 years and, it can be argued, scarcely draws
it better now than he did when he started the strip in 1989. But the quality of
the art did not matter in the 1980s and matters very little now. The strip’s
backgrounds may be blank most of the time and barely sketched the rest of the
time, the characters’ poses may often be virtually identical from panel to
panel, and the characters’ facial expressions may range from simple to
nonexistent, but that too does not matter – because the strip, not long after
its inception, found a perfect focus for Adams’ abilities: the workplace,
specifically the Kafkaesque large-corporate workplace. It does not matter that
Dilbert has no mouth (except in occasional times of more-extreme-than-usual
stress) and that his eyes are invisible behind glasses, because his very
facelessness reflects his role as a smart but soul-crushed member of the
unappreciated workforce. It does not matter that Wally’s mouth usually consists
of pursed lips and that he too has eyes invisible behind glasses, because he
represents another common corporate type: the competent but useless employee
whose main skill is work avoidance and who keeps his job because firing him
would reduce the empire of his boss. And it does not matter that that boss,
although he does have visible eyes and mouth, has no name and sports two tufts
of hair that look suspiciously like devil’s horns – because a nameless boss
just seems to go with faceless characters, and the boss does in fact bedevil
his subordinates in a wide variety of soul-stealing ways (and, as longtime
readers know, is in fact the brother of a sort-of-actual devil known as Phil,
the Prince of Insufficient Light).

The consistency with which these typecast
characters stand up to scrutiny is shown anew with every Dilbert collection, including Cubicles
That Make You Envy the Dead, the 46th numbered volume. Much of
the genuinely wry commentary on office life and the world that encourages it
comes at Dilbert rather than from him. Dogbert, Dilbert’s dog (who
also has no mouth and eyes hidden behind glasses), is a frequent source, as
when Dilbert is falsely accused of lying at work and Dogbert tells him, “I know
you aren’t a liar” – which makes Dilbert feel better until Dogbert adds, “I see
you as more of an idiot.” Short-time or infrequently seen characters also
become commentary repositories, as when a new company app has “triggered a
zombie apocalypse” by being so addictive – and when tested on Zimbu the monkey,
leads Zimbu to say that he gets “a strong dopamine hit every time I click on
it. Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!” (Parallels to social-media apps are very much
intentional.)And at one point in the
latest collection, the boss hires “a story-telling mothman,” who really does
have an insect body, complete with wings and with antennae that look
suspiciously like boss-style horns. The boss explains that the mothman
“identifies the employees with the greatest workloads and wastes their time
telling long stories,” and when Dilbert protests that the firm does not need a
story-telling mothman, the boss asks, unarguably if you have any familiarity
with big-company workforces, “Then why does every company have one?”

And that is what has kept Dilbert in the front rank of comic
strips for so many years: not the art, which is “suboptimal,” as Dilbert would
(and sometimes does) say, but the way Adams taps into corporate culture day
after day, creating characters who (objectively) cannot possibly exist in terms
of appearance but who (also objectively) do
exist in terms of how they think and what they do. Whether big-corporate life
has gotten better since Dilbert
started is purely a matter of opinion. What is a matter of certainty is that it
has not gotten sufficiently better to
stop Adams from continuing to mine what appears to be an unending lode (or
load) of soul-crushing mediocrity and everyday dehumanizing behavior that is
somehow just shy of preventing all productive work from stopping altogether.

What if You Had T. rex Teeth!? And Other Dinosaur
Parts. By
Sandra Markle. Illustrated by Howard McWilliam. Scholastic. $4.99.

The place of the written word in our highly
visual age is increasingly difficult to determine. One approach to preserving
writing while accepting the apparently unending fascination with visuals is to
create books in which the words are adjuncts to pictures – even when it is the
words, not the pictures, that contain virtually all the information. That is
Dan Green’s approach in Insta Graphics: A
Visual Guide to Your Universe, whose title doubly emphasizes what people
will see (“visual” and “graphics”) but whose actual content, much of it quite
fascinating, lies in the verbiage that the title downplays to the point of
omission. This is a six-section, visually striking book that, despite the
title, is scarcely universal in any sense: it is a compendium of miscellaneous
facts, a kind of “trivial pursuit” of reality, a book whose many pleasures of
discovery are almost incidental to the way the highly visual, photographically
rich pages look. This is not a “reference book” in any traditional sense, since
the facts it presents are random, organized only in very general terms in sections
called “Wacky World,” “To the Max,” “Super Senses,” “Pig Out,” “Supertech,” and
“Dangerous and Deadly.” Nevertheless, many of the facts here are fascinating.
Young readers may already know that the vast majority of Earth’s surface is
covered by liquid water (71%), but are unlikely to be aware that temperature
rises one degree Fahrenheit for every 70 feet of depth inside our planet. The
fact that Everest is the world’s highest mountain is well-known, but the fact
that the highest mountain in Europe is Elbrus is much less familiar. Readers
aware that the blue whale is the largest animal on Earth, and indeed believed
to be the largest animal that has ever lived, may not know that the strongest
creature on the planet is the horned dung beetle, which can lift 1,141 times
its own body weight. This is the way the entire book proceeds, mixing
comparatively familiar information with decidedly abstruse facts. For example,
the male silkworm moth can pick up the scent of a female a mile away; a mollusk
called the West Indian fuzzy chiton has eye lenses made of limestone; muscles
represent 31.56% of a human’s body weight, skin 7.81%, and the digestive tract
2.07%; worker bees travel the equivalent of two to three times around the world
for each pound of honey they make; what is believed to have been the largest
volcanic eruption of all time occurred under what is now Yellowstone Park; the
most toxic natural substance is botulinum, made by bacteria – and used in Botox
injections. There is a great deal more than this in Insta Graphics, with those pages that do not have bright and
prominent photos having bright and prominent geometric shapes within which the
information is presented in very short paragraphs. In one sense, the book
represents a capitulation of words to pictures: certainly its basic appearance
is a strongly visual one. In another sense, though, it represents a
well-meaning attempt to continue to present and transmit information to young
readers at a time when screens, smartphones and such have become their dominant
method of perceiving and interacting with the world.

There is also a strongly visual element to
the long-running What if You Had…
series by Sandra Markle and Howard McWilliam. Here too there is interesting
information accompanying the visuals that dominate the individual pages and the
overall appearance of the books. The main attraction of these volumes, though,
is not what they explain but how McWilliam creates fascinating and often bizarre
hybrid creatures by visually attaching animal parts to children. The bizarre
element is especially strong in the latest series entry, which also has the
most-complicated title to date. All the earlier books refer to an animal
something-or-other (feet, ears, nose, tail, etc.); ask What if You Had… the body part; and follow the question with both
an exclamation point and a question mark. This time, though, the word “animal”
is missing from the title, and the book does not simply substitute “dinosaur”
to create What if You Had Dinosaur
Parts!? Instead, apparently going for grossness, the title focuses on the
always-reliable attraction of Tyrannosaurus
rex, shows a huge-toothed hybrid boy-dinosaur with wide-open mouth on the
cover, and throws in the after-title phrase And
Other Dinosaur Parts to indicate that this is not simply a tooth or T. rex book. The whole thing is a bit
awkward, and so is the book itself. A lot of the fun of these books involves
showing how the possession of animals’ parts would simplify (or at least
change) everyday childhood activities, but the mixture does not work here as
well as in earlier volumes. For instance, one entry is about the vicious Velociraptor and the frightening sharp
toes and serrated teeth it used to catch and devour prey – that is the
informational part of the entry. On the facing page, the notion of a girl using
those “sickle-tipped toes” for the innocent and mundane purpose of opening
birthday presents seems just a bit too far over-the-top. Similarly, a page on
the head crest of Parasaurolophus,
apparently used to amplify sounds so they could be heard at long distances, is
informationally interesting; but the facing page, suggesting that such a crest
would somehow help a girl “lead the school marching band,” is weak. The hybrid
drawings are even odder here than in earlier series entries, and the factual
material is presented as simply and straightforwardly as always – and both
those elements of the book are pluses. But the imaginary way that dinosaur
parts would enhance children’s daily lives today are just not as interesting as
are the imagined uses of animal eyes, ears, tails and so forth in other books
from this series. Still, kids who have enjoyed earlier Markle/McWilliam
creations will find things somewhat amusing as well as somewhat informative
here. And certainly the book provides further evidence, if any is needed, about
the emphasis on strictly visual elements in books that try to interest today’s
young readers in the material that is contained in the words.

The style of composers inevitably changes over time in accordance with
the changes in their lives, reputations, expectations, and interests in taking
their music in new directions. But these changes can be either subtle or
substantial. Two composers for whom they were substantial were Stravinsky and
Haydn: Stravinsky’s style changed so much over his career that there almost
seem to be multiple Stravinskys, while Haydn’s developed so substantially that
he became a bridge from the Baroque era to the edge of the Romantic.
Occasionally, a recording will explicitly or implicitly show just how extensive
a composer’s progress (or at least change) turned out to be. That is the case
with an excellent new two-SACD PentaTone Stravinsky recording featuring the
Orchestre Philharmonique de Luxembourg conducted by Gustavo Gimeno. Stravinsky
lived to be nearly 89 (from 1882 to 1971) and had a remarkable 70-year career,
during which he absorbed and worked within styles and techniques ranging from
19th-century Russian nationalism (learned from his teacher,
Rimsky-Korsakov) to neoclassicism (with which Stravinsky is especially closely
identified) to serialism (to which Stravinsky came late in life, handling it in
his own distinct way). Bits of several Stravinskys are in evidence under
Gimeno’s knowledgeable and enthusiastic direction. The earliest work here, Funeral Song, is not only redolent of
Rimsky-Korsakov but is also a tribute to him: it was composed after the older
composer’s death in 1908 and first played in January 1909. It was then lost for
a century, eventually rediscovered, and first played in modern times as
recently as 2016. An attractive work that gives instrument after instrument its
chance to pay its respects to Rimsky-Korsakov, Funeral Song is a piece that in no way presages The Rite of Spring, written in 1911-12
and given its still-notorious first performance in 1913. Gimeno gives the
primitivism and rhythmic vitality of this piece its full due while never losing
sight of its origin as a ballet: this is a danceable version of The Rite of Spring as well as one that
works nicely as a concert presentation. Stravinsky’s neoclassicism actually has
its roots prior to The Rite of Spring,
in Petrushka (1911), but he developed
it fully only in later years, and certainly it is abundantly clear in Jeu de Cartes (1937). The balletic
elements remain in the forefront in this reading – creation of ballets is one
thing Stravinsky did throughout his compositional life – but the sparer scoring
and greater transparency of orchestral parts clearly show Jeu de Cartes to date from one of the later Stravinsky styles. A
decade after the ballet, Stravinsky remained in largely neoclassical mode with
his Concerto in D “Basel” (1946).
Although created as a concerto for string orchestra, the short (12-minute) work
has elements of divertimento about it, along with overall neoclassical poise
and a kind of rhythmic accentuation that stayed with Stravinsky throughout his oeuvre. Matters certainly did change in
some ways, though, by the time of Agon
(1957, but begin as early as 1953). Yes, it is a ballet, and it includes
Stravinsky’s first use of strict twelve-tone technique, but it combines the nod
to Schoenberg with a look back many centuries, to dances such as the Saraband
and Gaillarde, managing to cram 16 separate sections into less than 22 minutes
– a Webernesque miniaturization process, and in fact some of the use of
thematic fragmentation is actually reminiscent of Webern. The performances of
all five works in this release are very well done, thoughtfully presented and
stylishly played, and the two discs, taken together, create a fascinating
portrait of quite a few of Stravinsky’s multifaceted compositional approaches.

The latest recording of Haydn symphonies by the splendid Handel and
Haydn Society period orchestra is also, in its own way, a portrait of the
development of Haydn’s style, even though it contains only two works by Haydn.
The contrasts between the Symphonies Nos. 49 and 87 are, however, so many, that
this CORO disc becomes a fascinating exploration-in-miniature of the way
Haydn’s style changed over time. Separated by some 20 years, the two symphonies
are worlds apart in approach and effects. No. 49 is so emphatically in F minor
that all four movements are in the home key, with just a flicker of major-key
writing in the third movement’s trio. It is the last Haydn symphony written in Sonata da chiesa style, with the slow
movement placed first instead of second. It is a deeply serious work, called
“La Passione” even in Haydn’s lifetime (although not so named by the composer),
possibly first performed at a church service where Christ’s Passion was the
center of attention. Wide leaps, intense expressiveness, and virtuosic demands
on a small orchestra combine to make this an exceptionally moving and unusually
intense symphony even within Haydn’s Sturm
und Drang period, of which it is one of the very best representatives, in
some ways the best. No. 87 is as
different a work as can be, created for a significantly larger orchestra and
written in a sunny A major. Amusingly, this recording’s booklet notes include
one writer saying that this was the first-written of the six “Paris” symphonies
and another stating that it was written last. What matters, though, is simply
its position as one of that symphonic group, which cemented Haydn’s
international reputation and brought him considerable celebratory acclaim (as
well as a considerable amount of money). Harry Christophers does not vary his
orchestra’s size for the two symphonies, but he handles the works with so sure
a sense of sectional balance and overall style that No. 87 sounds as if a
larger ensemble is playing it. And the work’s ebullience comes through with
abundant clarity, along with the precision and excellence of its construction.
Haydn certainly developed a great deal in the years between these two
symphonies – but it is worth pointing out that each of the works is equally
impressive and equally effective, albeit in a very different way. Christophers
has been including Mozart violin concertos with his Haydn symphonic releases,
providing an intriguing contrast between the two composers, and on this CD he
presents the Sinfonia Concertante, K.
364, for violin and viola – a wonderful work by any estimation. Aisslinn
Nosky, concertmaster of the Handel and Haydn Society, is joined as soloist by
violist Max Mandel, with whom she has played for more than two decades – and it
shows in the remarkably easy, good-natured give-and-take between the solo
instruments as well as the consummate skill and sensitivity to period style of
both solo players. This is an altogether lovely disc, its program seeming
somewhat arbitrary on the surface but proving, on closer examination, to be
exceptionally well-thought-out both in terms of giving listeners the experience
of two very different Haydn symphonies and in offering some wonderful Mozart
that separates the Haydn works on the CD while placing them beautifully in
context from a musical standpoint.

The context of the music of Franz Schreker (1878-1934) is quite
different, and the extent to which Schreker’s style evolved over the 20-year
period of the works on a new Naxos CD is debatable. Once deemed as important an
opera composer as Richard Strauss, Schreker fell into obscurity even as
Strauss’ reputation was cemented and soared. From the standpoint of musical
development, it is easy to see why: Strauss’ style changed significantly
between that of his early, famous tone poems and that of his final opera, Capriccio (1942). Yet Strauss
(1864-1949) was scarcely a slavish follower of the many musical changes that
occurred during his long life. Schreker, on the other hand, seems to have
remained firmly with late Romanticism in terms of musical style and emotional
communication – with the result that his works, although very well-constructed
and often quite engaging to hear, do not really stand out stylistically from
those of other composers of the era (including those of Strauss that date to
the same time period). All this is hindsight, though, and a bit unfair to
Schreker, whose works – thanks to the tireless devotion of JoAnn Falletta to
the rediscovery of interesting, neglected repertoire – show considerable skill
in orchestration and, often, a fine flair for the dramatic. “Often” is not
“always”: Vorspiel zu einem Drama
(1914), an expanded version of the overture to Schreker’s lurid opera Die Gezeichneten (which was not
performed complete until 1918), is
rather shapeless and surface-level impressionistic. However, the work is filled
with beauty and lyricism that make it certainly worth hearing, and Falletta
does quite a good job of holding it together with greater cogency than one
might expect. The protagonist of Die
Gezeichneten is hunchbacked and deformed, and Schreker evokes considerable
sympathy for him in the opera, at least for a time. A similar protagonist, an
ugly dwarf, lies at the heart of the pantomime The Birthday of the Infanta (1923); indeed, his death of a broken
heart (when he realizes that the haughty princess does not love him and has been
laughing at rather than with him) is the climax of the music and of the Oscar
Wilde story on which the theatrical production is based. Here as in Vorspiel zu einem Drama, Schreker
combines lush orchestration with emotionally affecting lyricism, especially in
the last few pieces of the 10-movement suite. Yet there is little significant
musical development between this work and the richly scored, conservatively
harmonized Romantische Suite (1903):
over a 20-year period, Schreker’s style solidified without changing in any
significant way. Falletta makes about as good a case for these works as they
are likely to receive, thanks not only to her sure-handed orchestral direction
but also to the absolutely first-rate playing of the Berlin Radio Symphony
Orchestra (more often listed as Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin). This is a
world-class ensemble whose tonal richness and exceptional sectional balance fit
Schreker’s music beautifully, giving listeners who enjoy late-Romantic music
multiple opportunities to bask in Schreker’s expressive richness.